Astead Herndon

This strikes me that you were kind of coming up against this two years ago, even before Donald Trump had gotten back into office and then kind of had taken aim at this program more recently.

It seems to me as if you would have known that $100,000 number, that could have made that decision a lot easier for you earlier, right?

Mm-hmm.

You know, you mentioned kind of about being a proud American.

You mentioned about what this country has given you.

Is there any kind of, I don't know, like a feeling or that when it comes time to build this company here that you're going back to India?

Is there anything you owe the United States to build the company here?

A question I have for you is, you know, what do you think the solution is?

I mean, we're coming at a point now where H-1Bs have been kind of politicized for several years.

There's been so much back and forth about what the right level should be.

You get back and forth messages from the White House itself.

From your perspective of someone who has experienced kind of the system firsthand, what would be the biggest thing that the country could do to make your life easier?

Is some of what we're kind of subtly talking about here a kind of American cultural thing, too, that we think that, like, you know, because of maybe because of our education system or because of maybe something of the American worker are just not fit for the emergence of jobs that we have right now?

That was tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa.

This episode was produced by Peter Baladan-Rosen and Myles Bryant.

Edited by Miranda Kennedy.

Fact-checked by Hadi Mawagdi and Laura Bullard.

And our engineers are Patrick Boyd and Adrian Lilly.

The rest of the team includes Avishai Artsy, Danielle Hewitt, Kelly Wessinger, Ariana Aspadu, Noel King, Sean Ramosrom, Amina Alsadi, and Jolie Myers.

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